Dear, dear, dear

My apologies for the long blogging hiatus. My birthday and the holidays are coming up so I’ve been busy–and I just “wasn’t feeling” blogging. I know from experience that if I try to post while I’m not in the mood it’s going to be crap.

BUT I also know from experience that if I let myself take TOO long a break from blogging I’ll never get going again! And then you guys would worry about whatever happened to me…

So today I started doing bloggy stuff again and checking my comments, and found out I’d been nominated for the Liebster Award by Shona of Absolute Frankness.

I did a silent fist-pump, then proceeded to check out her blog. I’d never heard of her before!

Her blog is dedicated, as the name would imply, to being absolutely frank. About everything. Basically making sure that she never once even unfolds a rose-colored blindfold. The cynical, darkly-humorous, depressing-poetry-writing side of me can definitely side with this. I’m kind of opposite of this, however; I try to make my blog optimistic, and I do like to think that The Girl in the Orange is a place where people can come and get a little extra shot of happiness in their day, because, as Shona says, sometimes life truly does suck. (How’s that for optimism?) But Absolute Frankness is such a refreshing take on blogging, and I can definitely admire her for being okay with talking about the darker aspects of life, the elephants in the room, and so I’ll be sure to keep tabs on the blog. Check it out!

Google Translate (no shame!) informed me that Liebster is German for ‘dear’, ‘dearest’, or ‘my favorite’. You can never really trust Google Translate, so I do hope I got this right. Otherwise the title of this post would be just…lame.

And the rules for accepting this award are as follows:

1) Post eleven facts about yourself
2) Answer the questions the tagger has set for you and create eleven questions for people you’ve nominated
3) Choose eleven people to give this award to (with less than 200 followers) and link them in your post
4) Go to their page and tell them

So, eleven facts about moi.

I can do this. (And I must ask, why eleven?)

1. On the weekends when I’m too lazy to put in my contacts, I have big square nerd glasses, along with braces. And you wondered why I haven’t ever posted any pictures of myself, didn’t you?

2. Sometimes in class I’ll realize I’m whistling to myself or muttering “Pretty bird!!” under my breath. Such is the fate of an enthusiastic cockatiel owner. And I wondered why people always turn to stare at me.

3. I faint/puke at the sight or mention of blood.

4. When I’m studying for a math test, I put a (bad) tune to my notes and sing them out loud. “The perpendicular bisector conjeeeec-tuure!!”

5. I stink at drawing. Or any form of art that involves fine motor coordination.

6. I play viola and guitar and sing, though it’s hard to do them at the same time.

7. I actually like vanilla better than chocolate, but it doesn’t come in powder or bar form and therefore it is much less convenient.

8. My best ideas for poems come to me at two in the morning, so I keep a notebook and pencil on my nightstand. Unfortunately, I can’t turn on my light in the middle of the night or else my bird will have night frights, so the ends of my stanzas always

tilt

down at the

ends

and sometimes they run into other stanzas too.

9. Once I awoke with the feeling that I had written something really clever in said notebook the night previously, but when I eagerly opened it I had penned only:

catsheep or rather, an almost-butterfly

An almost-butterfly does sound rather poetic, but I still have no idea what it had to do with a cat or a sheep, or why I crossed those out.

10. I make pancakes almost every weekend, but my maple syrup bottle is still nearly full because I prefer to keep the pancakes in the freezer and simply eat them as snacks throughout the week. Yup. Frozen pancakes.

11. I’m probably the only teenager in the history of the world who insists that no cakes, cookies, or other delicacies be baked for her coming birthday. Yup, I’ma hit up froyo.

And now, to answer Shona’s questions:

1. What’s your favorite smell?

Oh, I have many. I’m an extremely olfactorily-oriented person; I smell everything. (But don’t read too much into that.) I guess, in no particular order, they are: freshly baked brownies, freshly baked bread, books, pizza, and parrots (if you burrow your nose in their feathers they smell like peanuts!).

2. Would you rather go to Swansea or Portsmouth?

Gesundheit.

(pauses, consults Google maps)

Oh, those are places in the UK! Well, howdy, from across the pond!

Um…Portsmouth..? It’s got a cooler name…

3. Savory pancakes or classic lemon and sugar?

Haha, that’s funny. Cuz I was just talking about…pancakes…ha…ha…

Is that another UK thing? I’ve never had pancakes with lemon OR sugar.

Insurgent, by Veronica Roth. It’s kind of scary how similar the novel I’m writing is to the Divergent series.

6. Would you live in an Enchanted Forest?

That depends. What are my other options?

Is my only other option the real world? …Then, yes, I probably would. But I would want to take my laptop, and my bird.

7. If you were a Fairy Queen what would you be queen of?

Inspiration. There’s so many perfectly good people that faithfully sit down to write every day, but sometimes your muse deserts you. I would fight this horrid crime and serve as a backup muse for writers everywhere, drifting into their ears whenever they experience the dreaded Writer’s Block.

8. Would you like to live in the countryside or the city?

I really don’t know. A couple of years ago, I would have said countryside, hands down, but now I’m not so sure. Cities are kind of beautiful, in their own special way–just one awesome mess of humanity. I love it.

Until you step in cigarettes and gum and then you wish you were in the countryside.

But then you get lonely. I would get lonely, at any rate. I am a self-professed introverted extrovert; I have to be surrounded by people, but I’m happy when they leave me alone.

Hats are very useful for hiding awful hair and managing to look stylish at the same time, and I occasionally wear them for this purpose. Now that I’ve got a pixie cut, I can’t very well wear a baseball cap, or else my semi-feminine facial characteristics start to appear questionable…

11. Would you have brought the ring to Mordor or let Sam do it for you?

I’ve never read The Lord of the Rings. I tried, but I unwisely chose to try to read it out loud to my bird. It’s not the kind of book you read out loud, with all the Sam and Ham Gamgees and Bilbo Baggins from Bag-End and all. But I’m gonna be proactive here and say I’ll bring it myself.

My questions for my nominees:

1. What did you have for breakfast? Do you, by any chance, have a picture? #nerdalert

2. When you read a book, what point-of-view do you like to read? (eg, first person, third person, omniscient)

3. If someone you loved started trying to convince you that there were extraterrestrial beings in your closet, would you side with them or turn them into an asylum?

4. If you could make it rain ANYTHING, what kind of precipitation would you like?

You will notice that three nominees is not equal to eleven nominees. I will commend you for your astute observation, then explain: At the moment I don’t follow a LOT of wordpress blogs–a good number, but not a lot–and it felt false to give the award to a blogger who I haven’t been following and enjoying for a while. Most of the bloggers that fall into that category I’ve already previously nominated for the Sunshine Award, and it felt cheesy and clingy to nominate the same blogger for two different awards. Lastly, my internet search for blogs worthy of the award was taking me upwards of two hours, and I value my retinas and mental health. So, my consensus is this: as I discover more blogs I would like to nominate, they will be posted on here over time. :)

3 thoughts on “Dear, dear, dear”

Great answers! Glad you liked my blog – it’s a bit dark, a bit cynical, but that’s a little bit like me I guess. Your blog is like a refreshing opposite of mine! A bright ray of orange as opposed to the rain-washed locales of Absolute Frankness. (And I never considered the maple syrup option – I won’t forget about it again!) Anyway, keep up the good work! x